Talk:Blue Mouse Theatre

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A fact from Blue Mouse Theatre appeared on Wikipedia's Main Page in the Did you know column on 31 December 2009 (check views). The text of the entry was as follows:

Did you know... that Blue Mouse Theatre in Tacoma's Proctor District, opened by John Hamrick in 1923, is now the oldest continuously operating theater in the U.S. state of Washington?

A record of the entry may be seen at Wikipedia:Recent additions/2009/December.

Wikipedia

Sources

This source has some good information [1]. ChildofMidnight (talk) 23:01, 20 December 2009 (UTC)[reply]

I'm getting confused about the Portland Blue Mouse and its two locations. The second location was built in 1928 with seating for 850 and a single screen? Designed by Albert Mercier and Lee Arden Thomas, who also designed the Oriental Theatre (Portland, Oregon) and several other venues? How many seats were at the first location? ChildofMidnight (talk) 18:18, 23 December 2009 (UTC)[reply]

The Name "Blue Mouse"

Despite the claim on the theater's official web site, it's unlikely that the Blue Mouse Theatre was named for a lounge in Paris. There were at least four theaters in the United States called The Blue Mouse before John Hamrick opened his first theater of that name. St. Paul, Baltimore, Washington DC, and Fort Worth all had theaters called The Blue Mouse during the 1910s, some in operation at least as early as 1911.

It is likely that all these theaters, including Hamrick's, and probably the Paris lounge as well, derived their name from a popular play called The Blue Mouse, the English language version of which was written by the then-popular but now largely forgotten playwright Clyde Fitch. Fitch's work was adapted from a German play by Alexander Engel and Julius Horst. Fitch wrote his adaptation for the Shubert brothers, who had bought the English rights to the German play.

After a tryout at the Hyperion Theatre in New Haven, Connecticut, Fitch's play opened at the Lyric Theatre in New York City on November 30, 1908, and ran until June, 1909, after moving to the Maxine Elliot Theatre. It was enormously popular, and road show companies were still performing the play well into the 1910s. Hamrick would not have had to travel to London to see the play (the other legend which has arisen about the name of this theater is that he and his wife saw the play on a trip to London) as it would have been presented in Seattle by at least one road show company. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 75.52.144.159 (talk) 12:09, 9 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]